How we lost the world

Chapter 8 - then - Linda

When it hit me, I felt like one of those cartoon characters - slapping their head as if they were a stupid idiot.

Of course!

My best mothers' day gift ever was when my three boys - my husband and my kids, made me a garden plot to grow vegetables. It was a dream come true and I try to grow something every year.

But this year, my winter crops had been a dismal failure.

I usually grow broad beans and attempt to grow peas. Most years my broad beans - while they take a while - produce a bumper crop.

But this year, I thought the beans must have been slow, or hiding. Things don't really ramp up in Canberra until it gets warmer. So I thought maybe this year September was too early to expect some results.

I love stolen moments out in the garden amongst all the busy-ness of life - when I wander around my garden and marvel at the life of bees. I especially love it when I see some of our Australian native bees - the blue banded bees really stand out.

Blue banded bees have a clumsy, unsynchronised way of flying. Apart from their vibrant blue, the way they move makes them stand out.

So I thought back over the past few months and realised that I hadn't seen those busy clouds of bees - they're usually all over our rosemary and at this time of year, they're discovering the yellow dandelions in the grass.

I'd ignored the outcry in the Canberra Gardener's page on Facebook. For a few years now, people have posted to say that the bees were missing from their garden.

I never thought it would happen to me.

I have so many flowers for them to discover - even if a lot of them are weeds - and I never use poisons in my garden, and this seemed to have worked.

But when I got home from work that first day, I went out into the garden to enjoy the unexpected pleasure of being home in the early afternoon in spring.

It wasn't all that quiet. Scott and Adam were out on the street with the other neighbourhood kids. This early in the piece, I didn't realise that they were learning to communicate with the new bees.

But I walked around my garden and it was as if reality shifted. Our plants suddenly looked strange and I missed the busy, relentless stream of bees.

I searched and searched for them - nothing.

And then I picked up buzzing of a different sort - our neighbours out on the street and went to join them.

We'd all been arriving home early from work and people were gravitating to our street of six or seven houses to share notes and - as it turned out, watch the increasingly-strange behaviour of our kids.

We swapped stories about what had been happening at work. For once, I had centre stage for a little while at least, because I work for the Department of the Environment, and the media team had been speaking to the Minister's office for most of the morning, hearing updates about all the schools.

But our stories didn't last all that long - they were taken over by something much more immediate as we watched our kids.

Little did we know it, but it was the start of a whole new life for our kids - one that would take them away from us.

They would no longer be learning from us - in fact from now on our roles would be reversed.